


Robin Redbreast

by shretl (girlundone)



Series: A Girl Needs A Gun These Days [8]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Mentions of Non-Consensual Drug Use, Mentions of Non-Consensual Sex, Pre-Canon, Pre-Mass Effect 1, Tenth Street Reds, birdtober
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:13:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27195613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlundone/pseuds/shretl
Summary: "I'm no angel, but I've spread my wings a bit." -- Mae WestThe prompt for the 25th day of Birdtober was robin. I was inspired to write a drabble of Rachel Shepard during her Tenth Street Red Days. Please heed the tags.
Series: A Girl Needs A Gun These Days [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1180568
Comments: 6
Kudos: 10





	Robin Redbreast

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SE_Soignee (Soignee)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soignee/gifts).



> Allusions to non-consensual drug use and non-consensual sex. Reader discretion is advised.

There was a robin on the steps of the Museum of Natural History.

It must have come from the Park, Shepard thought. Its pouting red breast set it apart from the careless iridescent pigeons and pushy brown sparrows that littered the staircase to the building, unmindful and unheeding of all the trampling humans in their wake.

Robins were a harbinger of spring, her dad had said. When he was still alive and his eyes gleamed with merriment. When he took her to her favourite museums. The warm, spacious but cosy Met in the winter and the sunny Cloisters in the summer with the cool breezes off the Hudson. Not the Natural History, with the bones of ancestors and the forlorn dioramas. The musty smell of matted fur, the skeletons of long-dead things all reminded her of that cold, dead, lifeless flat look in his eyes in the holos the cops had shown her that day he was shot. She tried not to remember it. She wouldn’t think about it now.

It wasn’t spring, though. Not yet, really. The March sky was as crystal blue as June but the wind was as cold as January. Shepard— no one ever called her Rachel, not even her dad— shivered in her thin wool coat. She bought it at the thrift store on Fourth Avenue because it looked like one she had seen in an old vid she liked, though considerably more moth-eaten. She always picked her clothes, albeit from thrift bins and not the glittering facades of stores that graced Broadway or Fifth, after vid stars she admired. It made her feel like she was playing a role. She was the gangster moll with the bright lips and witty comebacks, not the girl who lost her dad and home in the flash of a bullet to the back of the head. They couldn’t even face him.

Her lips were as scarlet as the robin’s breast. The girls, Aura and Destiny, had done her makeup the night before. They weren’t with the Reds, but they frequented the same hotel bars downtown that Shepard did, their clients were her marks. Mostly Bekenstein banker boys, but any out-of-towner would do. No one wanted to shit where they ate, as her dad’s friend Anatoly used to say. She wondered if he knew who did it. The hit. She wondered who knew and wouldn’t talk. They all made promises to her, after he died. If you need anything, they said. Anything at all. No one kept their promises.

The robin red lipstick clashed with her bright hair and her eye makeup was far too dark for the bright mid-morning light, but Shepard hadn’t had a chance to change from the night before. The world, the colours, the teal of the pigeon’s wing, warm brown sparrows, that robin’s scarlet breast, all seemed too pronounced, too sharp in the light of day, away from the dark bars downtown. Maybe her mark had slipped her something. They often did. Sometimes she woke up in hotel rooms and—

She wouldn’t think about it.

Detective Glassey was late. She met him uptown once or twice a month to inform on the Reds. A year ago, she had been picked up for solicitation. Had she been guilty of it? She never liked to think of where the lines between honeypot and hooker blurred. But they offered her a deal. No charges. She wouldn’t be sent back to that group home on Sullivan Street. She just had to turn on the Reds.

It was an easy choice.

She had no loyalty to the gang. She stuck with them because surviving on the streets alone was impossible. She knew. She tried it. She wished that she could be like that solidarity robin, ushering forth the hope of spring, but she was a pigeon. Pretty feathers but still street vermin.

The guilt ate at her the way a rat gnaws on garbage. She committed crimes every day. Swiping lipstick from the drugstore. Food from the bodega. Credit chits from blitzed out bankers. One day, it wouldn’t always be like this. One day, she’d be able to go back to school and get a job and she wouldn’t steal credits and passwords from off-world rich hicks who were too drunk or stoned, staring at her underage breasts to care. One day, she might even see the stars beyond the Hayden Planetarium. She’d see the aliens Finch was always railing against. She didn’t see why they should be any different from themselves. Weren’t they all like those birds on the steps of the museum? Different feathers of different colours, but hearts beating for the freedom of wings.

As she watched, shivering in the steps of the museum, the robin took flight into the brilliant blue sky.

Shepard waited.


End file.
